Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 2nd, 2007

[Mark Davidson]

The way to change the law, the responsibility to change the law, is the role of parliamentarians. Our responsibility as civil servants is to implement and administer the law that we've been given. This is why the minister has asked the committee for their advice on how to change the law.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

You have 30 seconds.

[Raymond Gravel, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

I'd like to make a comment. The legislation is there for the good of individuals, and not the opposite. Individuals are not there for the legislation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Well, you have 20 seconds, if you can fit something in.

Mr. Batters.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I am a new member of the committee, so I'm going to ask you to help me out a little bit so that I can help the minister responsible by providing him with some insight on how he might be able to change things for the better, especially regarding this issue of lost Canadians, which is new to me.

I fully respect the fact that you are public servants and not policy-makers, yet as a new member of this committee, I ask you to give me two or three very specific common headaches that plague you on a daily basis that, if dealt with, would make your lives and the lives of lost Canadians a lot easier. I'm not asking you for recommendations on policy changes; I'm asking for two or three common headaches that you, in your experience, face on a regular basis.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

That might be a difficult question to answer, but I'm sure Mr. Davidson is up to it.

[Mark Davidson]

It is indeed a difficult question to answer, because it does stray towards the line of civil servants not providing policy advice, in confidence to their minister. I would say that the legislation we have, both the 1947 and 1977 legislation, is quite old.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

I'm going to stop you there, Mr. Davidson, because I know which road this is going down.

I'm asking you to help me out a little bit, sir. Just restrict your comments, then, to something that everyone in your department—Again, I'm a new member of the committee, and, yes, I'm playing dumb a little bit here, but I truly am brand new to this. So give me something that everyone recognizes is a problem and that the minister will have heard a number of times is a problem. So you're not divulging any confidences here. These are things that could be addressed, and which everybody knows are problematic.

[Mark Davidson]

Probably the best example would be that piece of legislation the minister has indicated is a priority, and that's Bill C-14. We're aware that the treatment of adopted children, or children who have been adopted by Canadians outside of Canada, is not what it should be. Via the subsection 5(4) mechanism, we have a way to resolve these individual cases, but it's not an ideal situation. There is a bill in the House at the moment that is dealing with resolving that particular problem in citizenship.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Davidson.

The second question is about your indication that you don't really know how many lost Canadians might come forward when you do your ad campaign.

Are your offices prepared to deal with the influx of calls you might receive as a result of this ad campaign?

[Clark Goodman]

We've been talking about that, obviously. We've been going out and updating our websites and putting out materials, which may spur people to contact us with their questions. So our plan is to adjust our resources accordingly, in terms of what our priorities are. So if we have an influx of calls, be they at the call centre, or applications later on at the CPC, we'll adjust accordingly to make sure we can respond to those demands.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Will the individuals who fall into this lost Canadians category continue to be priorities for your department?

[Clark Goodman]

We have assigned many resources, yes.

[A voice]

The answer is yes.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

I just have a little bit more, Mr. Chair.

I want to know where you're at with your ad campaign. When are we going to see it? What form is it going to take? You talked about the website. Am I going to see television ads that say if one falls into this category, this category, or this category, you should check to see if you're a citizen? I want to know where that ad campaign is at.

[Clark Goodman]

I would say that it's still in the preliminary stages. I've indicated that we would take it under advisement to share with the committee the documents and the strategy.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

My last question, Mr. Chair, is—

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

On a point of order, I'm not sure, my hearing was—Did the witness say that he will share the campaign with the committee?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

That's what he said.

[Clark Goodman]

The original question to me was whether I would be willing to come back to the committee with information on the campaign, and I said I had to take that under advisement to the minister.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Okay. I was just asking what the status or the progress was.

My last question, Mr. Chair—and I'm really at a loss in this, because I'm new to the committee—is how did these people not know that they were lost Canadians? Many individuals are well into adulthood. For example, I have a social insurance number, and I really couldn't work without it. How does this happen? How do so many people not realize that they're not Canadians well into adulthood?

That's my question. It may be a very easy one.

[Mark Davidson]

It's actually a very good one.

The short answer is that every case is just a tiny little bit different from every other case. A lot of them turn on some archaic provisions in the 1947 act, where individuals could lose citizenship without their knowing about it because of some other action that they may have taken. So it's quite possible for individuals to have lost their citizenship without being aware of that, because of the way the legislation worked.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. Batters.

Mr. Alghabra.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I do want to thank all the witnesses for coming here this afternoon.

I want to follow up on a couple of the items that were raised here earlier today.

I have a question for you, Mr. Davidson. Do you believe that the issue of lost Canadians--maybe we can't judge all of them--is an unintended consequence of the law, or was it intended by the 1977 law?

[Mark Davidson]

I think we'd probably have to go back to the transcripts of Parliament in 1946 and in 1976. In some cases, I'd have to say it was intended. For some of these individuals who lost their citizenship, this is how the law had been intended to operate by Parliament. I'm not saying that's the case in every situation, but in some situations I think the short answer is yes.